Mending Wall
by Elliott Silver
Summary: He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'. Set after 4x01, Rise, with spoilers.


Title: Mending Wall

Author: Elliott Silver

Rating: T

Summary: He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'. Set after 4x01, Rise, with spoilers.

Author's note: Like a cloudy night, uneven in darkness, but with a star every now and again.

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"_We keep the wall between us as we go."_

-Robert Frost

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><p>All his life things have been easy for him.<p>

He's glided through on the swift wings of money, charm, and wit. Rick Castle likes things this way – simple, uncomplicated. And yet here he is in love with this woman, Kate Beckett. Loving her is hard, loving her is complicated.

He's never had to face consequences, never until now, until she lies dying.

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><p>She says she'll call, but she doesn't. He waits until he can wait no more. Then he tries to remember how to live without her. Too late he remembers that isn't possible anymore.<p>

So three months go by, one that he spends working with Esposito and Ryan on her case, one where he's banished from the precinct, and one that goes by without his noticing. He's almost forgotten what sunshine is like, what conversation sounds like when it isn't on tv and he has to be part of it.

Gina crashes in and drags him to book events. People tell him how great he is, but for the first time he doesn't want to hear it. The world is an indistinct murmur around him, and he is out of tune, stuck stubbornly on the wrong frequency.

All he can hear is her voice, and suddenly it comes to him. He looks up and she is there (again), almost as if she never left (but she did). His anger breaks all over again, but she tells him she is alone now, and so he goes with her.

They sit together and she tells him about her mother's case. She tells him about walls.

"I know I'm not going to be able to have the kind of relationship that I want until that wall comes down," she says. "And it's not going to happen until I put this thing to rest."

He too understands about walls, but she's torn down every last one of his defenses. She has done this, this senseless act of destruction, without even lifting a finger, and he isn't angry (no matter what he says), he doesn't hate her for it. He can't hate her because she's built her walls taller and higher because of him, while she's ripped all his away.

Castle shrugs. He doesn't want to tell her how much this hurts.

"Good fences make good neighbors," he says, and remarkably, it doesn't sound like his heart is broken.

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><p>Things go back to normal so quickly it makes his head spin. But it's normal with a twist. If life before was a martini garnished with an olive, now it's bedecked with lemon rind. The helix is there but the DNA has changed.<p>

Things have an edge of bitterness now.

Whereas before everything was possible, even them, now she's put a block on his dreams, built a wall to keep them out of her heart. She's put distance between them, built something so solid that he isn't sure it can ever be fully undone. Of course he knows why she's done it, but it doesn't make it hurt any less.

He has killed her patience, but she has killed his possibilities.

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><p>He stays anyway.<p>

He stays and sees her shaking so hard during that first case she almost can't get her gun in the holster. Blue light spills over her like an undertow, and he watches as she's nearly sucked within herself by fear. He's there standing behind her the second time a gun is on her, when she faces it.

"What changed?" he asks her later. It is late, but they are sitting together at her desk. She is filling out paperwork, signing forms.

"You," she answers without hesitation."You were there, behind me."

He holds her gaze.

"That's where I've always been."

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><p>What he never expects is how small she becomes.<p>

Some days he thinks she could fit in the palm of his hand, some days only in his arms.

Kate Beckett doesn't fill space the way she used to, and he isn't surprised because there's nothing left to her. She has returned skinny and bent, hunched over herself when she thinks no one's looking, as if curling over her mended heart.

She always feels cold now, as if there isn't enough blood in her body to keep her warm. He knows that bodies regenerate blood, has learned that from one of Alexis' advanced biology textbooks, but he thinks about how much she lost, how close she came. He thinks about the way it looked on Lanie's gloves, the way it soaked into the cemetery grass, the way it stuck under his nails.

He buys her a sweater, a scarf, even mittens. He brings a portable heater and plugs it under her desk. He gives her his jacket when they are in the precinct, which is drafty with chill. He drapes it over her shoulders, tucking it around her.

He realizes now how fragile she is, how breakable. She hasn't died but her heart stopped, and he's still afraid she will crumble at every turn. But the hell of being away from her is no worse than this perfect hell of being with her, this hell of trying to save her, if only from her own self-destruction, this bright flash-burn of her own arson, of her own immolation.

So he stays, and when she rises, he follows. They start walking together. He isn't sure where they are heading, but he's going with her and that's all he cares about.

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><p>One day she wears a shirt the color of mulberries.<p>

It dips low in the front, and when she bends over he sees a line on her skin that wasn't there before, pale and knotted, a shadow that shouldn't be there.

Suddenly Castle finds himself wondering what she looks like now, what she looks like naked. He's used to thinking about her this way, about the way her body looks in his mind (if not his arms), but it's never been like this. It never hurt.

He looks back, and she sees him looking.

He turns away and closes his fist, clenches it so tightly that he feels pain, and realizes that her battered and miraculous heart is even smaller than that, that it weighs far less. Some days he envied Josh for seeing her heart, seeing that center of her being that makes her be. This day he does not. Now he has seen the visible walls of her heart, and he knows no matter what they do, some of them will always be there now.

And he hates that it has come to that.

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><p>They're having burgers when it happens.<p>

He shakes the bottle of ketchup and squeezes. She laughs when nothing comes out, so he squashes the plastic against his palm. Red explodes across his fries, his plate, the table, even her shirt.

She stares at the pool of red, the sloppy way it drips onto the formica of the table, the slick way it slips down her chest as if it might never stop. He watches the horror fill her eyes, the vicious way she sees blood in this wet color.

"Kate," he says, but she is already rising, rising so quickly that she hits the table as she goes. The plates rattle, spoons bouncing, and red condiment splatters as she rushes towards the bathrooms.

He finds her in the ladies' room hunched over a chipped toilet, violently spewing up onion rings and milkshake. Her back shakes as she heaves, as her body tries to twist inside out.

When she looks back at him, her eyes are glazed as they were in the cemetery.

"Castle," she says, but her voice is clogged.

She gags and grips the bowl.

He goes to her, flushes the toilet, and holds her hair back as she retches again. He kneels on the cold tile floor with her until she stops. She gasps for air, and spits the aftertaste into the toilet.

She leans her head, sweaty and limp, against his shoulder.

"I know," she whispers. "I remember."

He stares at her.

"I remember," she says again, and suddenly he knows exactly what she is saying.

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><p>He takes her home with him.<p>

They pile into a cab. She's stopped throwing up, but she's weak on her feet and he guides them with his arm around her.

He takes her to his bed in a way he never imagined, and he refuses to leave her alone. She's too exhausted to sleep, so they lie there together in the darkness.

"Did you know Robert Frost went to Russia in 1962?" he asks to cover the silence, before she can say she's sorry for something that isn't her fault.

"Why?"

"To read a poem," he answers her.

She waits and he fills the stillness.

"It was about walls."

"Was it?" she asks, and he recites it for her now, lines of words he didn't even know he remembered. When he is done, she takes his hand in hers and places his palm over her chest, over the scars there. He feels the rough edges where her skin has come together again, the flatness of her sternum, the curves of her breasts, and beneath it all, pounding, he does not feel a wall.

He feels only that blessed beat of her non-stopping heart.

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><p>They don't talk about it but they do go on.<p>

Castle starts to think they've finally moved on, finally found some measure of equilibrium again. They work cases like they always have, like her heart isn't stitched together, like his doesn't need mending. It isn't enough, but he tries to tell himself that it's enough for now. It's just that it isn't, it really isn't.

It is late when she comes to him. She stands at his doorway, in the light, as if anything's possible, even those things they want most. As if she doesn't understand – doesn't want to – the delicate but enduring architecture of masonry. As if she knows walls are about what comes together, about how things merge and mend, not what is kept apart.

"Kate," he says, and his voice is very soft.

"I know," she says again. "I remember."

He looks at her.

"I remember," she says again, and suddenly he knows exactly what she is saying.

When she kisses him, it is soft and sure and unhurried. Her arms come around him and she pulls them together.

"But something there is that does not love a wall," he says in wonder, reciting the first line of Frost's poem, that sparkling thing the New Hampshire poet read to the Russians just months before they moved missiles to Cuba, a time when possibilities were still possible, when just hope, just words, might be able to avert chaos, maybe even armageddon.

She continues where he left off. "It comes to little more, there where it is we do not need the wall."

Castle breathes, he hopes, and she smiles.

It isn't over yet – not even by a long shot – but he closes the door behind her and Kate Beckett moves into his rooms, into a darkness they finally share together.

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><p>Things change, but only a little.<p>

He brings her coffee, but this time it's decaf. He follows her to crime scenes, but stays a step or two closer to her. He touches her more now, as if to reassure himself that she is still there, her shoulder, her hand, her back.

She doesn't stop him.

"I love you," he tells her again one day.

Castle knows she won't say those words (not yet), and he thinks she won't say anything at all (but she does).

"I love that you make my heart beat," she replies and keeps moving, because she can.

He doesn't know how this all will end, but what he knows is that they are together, again, together in this trial by existence. And, in the end, no matter what happens in all the hours to come, he wouldn't change that – this mending wall – for anything.

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End file.
